In Ludhiana's Brown Hospital sits Chand Kaur, sobbing, cursing and swearing angrily and often incoherently. "I fell at their feet. I said we are Jat Sikhs, your people, though my husband has cut his hair. But they pushed me aside, saying, 'Go away, we must finish all these people quickly', "she says, describing the harrowing moments on a lonely stretch of a link-road near Muktsar that left 14 bus passengers dead and seven injured, including her husband Surjit Singh. The clerk was shot in the head and may never recover his sight.

But he was one of the fortunate few who still lives to tell the gory tale, for hardly one of the bullets that the four murderers - armed with automatic pistols and Sten guns - fired in the state transport bus that morning missed its target. Despite heavy automatic firing, not a single bullet had struck the body, roof or the seats of the bus which now stood as mute evidence of the outrage: blood dripping from the creeks in its body and flies swarming all over its bloodied insides. Said a haggard-looking Surjit Singh Barnala as he returned from the scene of the slaughter: "The terrorists definitely want a communal divide and violent clashes as only that can cause the migration of Hindus away from Punjab and of the Sikhs towards it." Soon enough, his cabinet was pleading with the Centre to prevent reprisals outside Punjab at any cost as that could foul up the communal atmosphere in the state.

In terms of the number of lives it consumed, as well as political fall-out, this was the worst carnage of all in the five-year history of blood, gore and terror in Punjab. In 15 frenetic minutes in the early hours of July 25, the terrorists had succeeded in putting the clock back on the hopes generated exactly a year ago when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late Sant Harchand Singh Longowal signed the peace accord in New Delhi. Now, as the whole northern region of the country seethed with rage and indignation, a fresh fear psychosis spread among the Hindus in Punjab and as vicious riots broke out in parts of the capital the terrorists were probably laughing up their sleeves.

Barnala and Ray at Muktsar site

Last fortnight, they seemed to be winning as tension descended over north India. At Shimla and elsewhere in Himachal Pradesh. Sikh shops were ransacked and several bus passengers beaten up. In Ambala, a Sikh was stabbed to death and, as tension rose in several cities in Punjab the army, for the first time since the accord was signed, staged flag marches in the volatile border towns of Amritsar. Tarn Taran, Dera Baba Nanak, Fatehgarh Churian, Batala and Gurdaspur.

Barely had Union Home Minister Buta Singh finished making a statement to Parliament on the Muktsar killings after his hurried visit to the spot that reports of heightening tension began to come in from several west Delhi colonies, where mixed Hindu and Sikh populations have lived under a fair bit of tension for several months now. The resettlement of Sikh widows of the November 1984 riots and then the Hindu migrants fleeing from Punjab had not exactly helped remove communal distrust in this sprawling, gentrified lower middle-class ghetto.

Early next morning the area was aflame as hundreds of Hindus, led by the Punjab migrants, came to the streets in Tilak Nagar where a huge crowd of commuters waited for buses, and began a siapa, the noisy, Punjabi-style public mourning where women wail and beat their breasts and thighs. Tempers ran high and group clashes broke out in an area where Sikhs are not hopelessly outnumbered and where they had remained prepared for just this eventuality.

As stones and soda-water bottles flew and a pyromania reminiscent of November 1984 seized the rival mobs, streets were soon littered with debris and blood. "I will never understand how people's moods transformed so fast. A minute earlier, we were all quietly waiting for our buses. Now, several (people) were throwing stones and burning vehicles while still clutching their lunch-boxes," recalls an incredulous Mathew Koshy, who was desperately trying to get away from the scene on the afternoon of July 26. The violence, however, was not unanticipated. "It was expected, a consequence of the militant Hindu revivalism that has been visible for some time," said Delhi Police Commissioner Ved Marwah.

Trouble soon spread to nearby Janakpuri, Hari Nagar and even the business district of Karol Bagh as angry mobs - several of them led by people carrying trishuls, the symbol of the militant Hindu - asked shopkeepers to pull down shutters. Buta Singh and Parliamentary Affairs Minister H.K.L. Bhagat, who visited Tilak Nagar, were heckled by angry residents and until the Gurkhas of the army began to march across the area, there was no sign of any force controlling the violence.

But the situation, this time, was significantly different from what had happened in November 1984. At the very outset, the prime minister called up Delhi Lieutenant-Governor H.L. Kapur to put down violence effectively even if it meant calling out the army right away. The administration also requisitioned the services of an air force helicopter for aerial surveillance of the capital. Also, this time, Sikhs were standing up to the mobs. In fact, three of the men killed in police firing were Sikhs. According to senior officials, they were shot while they were sniping from roof-tops at the attacking mobs.

Yet again, rumours of killings and counter-killings had left the capital perilously close to the edge of the short fuse. "It is madness. People rioting in Delhi are only serving the cause of those who killed innocent people in the bus in Muktsar," said retired It-general Jagjit Singh Aurora, the new Rajya Sabha member from Punjab. Extremely worried by the fall-out of the killings at Muktsar, the Union Cabinet resolved to put it down in the most effective manner possible. The police had been ordered to shoot rioters, and to shoot to kill.

Just like the reprisals elsewhere, the killings in Muktsar too were not entirely unanticipated. Because of increased pressure from the police, the terrorists had not been able to do anything of significance for some time and an impression was growing that they were on the defensive. In such a situation, they were bound to try and pull off something spectacular. A day before the killings, Punjab police chief J.F. Ribeiro had warned Ranjan Gupta, the Faridkot district police superintendent, of the possibility. The police were expecting an attack on some VIP's.

But the terrorists stuck to their favourite target, the transport buses, which they have now hit four times with success, beginning with the midnight massacre of eight Hindus at Dhilwan near Amritsar on October 5, 1983, that saw the fall of the Darbara Singh government. Even this time, their planning was meticulous and they left no tracks for the police to follow.

Rioting in Delhi: sharp recoil

They forced a farmer to give them a ride on his Ford tractor to an irrigation channel about a kilometre away and then disappeared on foot. Police dogs were able to trace the smell for another 8 km towards the township of Gurharsahai and then lost it. The place is just about an hour's drive from the border. But the police suspect that the murderers are still hiding in the area.

There was also added cruelty this time in the manner the killings were executed: letting out women and children, making the clean-shaven men bury their heads between their knees and then shooting each one turn-by-turn while shouting, for the benefit of the survivors, that they wanted to teach a lesson to "these fat Hindus". The objective was obviously to cause as much indignation among the victims' communities as possible. It was achieved the next morning as people received their newspaper copies. Riots broke out in west Delhi soon afterwards.

Yet another significant fall-out of the killings was the confirmation of the security machinery's longstanding fear that the moment pressure is put on Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts, the terrorists will spill over into the adjoining districts, particularly Ferozepore, which too shares a long border with Pakistan. Some indications to the effect had been available of late: the killing of six car passengers last month and the increasing intelligence about the movements of known extremists.

Last fortnight itself, at the village of Marmaloo near Muktsar, five terrorists looted the passengers of a bus at gunpoint. But they were chased, caught and almost lynched by the villagers, mostly Sikhs. Still, these men were relatively smaller fry and the terrorists in the region now have their own murderous pantheon led by none else than Gurjit Singh, a relation of Bhindranwale. Intelligence sources confirm that he returned to Punjab from Pakistan about three months ago and commands a group of 30 armed men. Gurdev Singh Usmanwala and Gurdev Singh Satianwali are his deputies.

Last fortnight, the CRPF killed two Sikhs related to Usmanwala in an encounter near Ferozepore and intelligence reports received at Chandigarh had spoken of a furious Usmanwala asking his followers to "teach them a lesson". Besides these three, the police suspect that Waryam Singh, whom an intelligence officer in Chandigarh described as a "satanic killer", was among the Muktsar killers. The quartet figures on the "hit-list" of 38 prepared by Ribeiro, who asserted that the killers will be caught. Said he: "Morale, both among people and the forces, is much higher in this region than elsewhere. They will surely catch them."

Tilak Nagar during the violence

But if the latest outrage heavily dampened the recent feeling of police success in its drive against the terrorists the blame for this, at least partly, lay at their door. Earlier in the fortnight, they had launched with much fanfare Operation Mand, a massive overkill to clear the flood-prone, desolate riverine strip of land along the Beas River of terrorists. Helicopters, bull-dozers and mechanised boats were used in the campaign - from which much was expected. In the past, the police had lost the trail of fleeing terrorists on the fringe of the Mand region and there was suspicion that an isolated island in the Beas was the haunt of several terrorists, confirmed by the fact that a surveillance helicopter overflying the island was fired at last month.

The operation produced dazzling results; not so much in terms of captures of arms or criminals but in terms of publicity. Headlines talked of the capture of 200 terrorists and of the destruction of the "Khalistan capital". But all that the police had to show after the film-style spectacular were four pistols (two of them rusted), some ammunition, remnants of a crude arms factory, four cots and several illicit liquor stills.

Not a shot was fired in the 40-hour operation over the 240-sq km area and, in the end, the police were only embarrassed by the claims made in the publicity blitz. "The media played up the whole thing far out of proportion with the reality. We never claimed destruction of the 'Khalistan' capital and clearly stated that 200 persons had been picked up for questioning," said a defensive Amritsar Police Chief Mohammed Izhar Alam. But Kanwaljit Singh, minister of state for home affairs, claimed that the operation has finally brought the Mand area under government control.

The fact, however, remains that the whole show was put up on the eve of the monsoon session of Parliament to preempt the Opposition onslaught. It achieved that objective, but the highly-publicised claims raised expectations to dizzy heights and these suffered a sickening jolt with the Muktsar carnage and yet again caused a crisis of credibility for the police despite the impressive list of successes in days preceding the killings.

The killings also provided fresh ammunition to the Government's critics within the sharply-divided Akali Dal, led by the controversial Revenue Minister Major Singh Uboke who had earlier dismissed Operation Mand as "Operation Fraud" and loudly complained, at a cabinet meeting, that "innocent Sikh youths and even women" were being harassed and tortured by the security forces. The Cabinet meeting last fortnight became particularly scrappy for Barnala as even several of his supporters spoke against the police action. The result was the first unsavoury meeting between Barnala, who thinks he can't afford to alienate his partymen beyond a limit, and Ribeiro, who was in no mood to relent. "I know the compulsions of politicians," he said, "but fighting terrorism is a lot more important than conceding to their demands."

It is also a lot more difficult, particularly now, with counter-violence threatening to spill into the neighbouring regions and the Punjab cities where the Hindus are in a majority. Anything could set off a major catastrophe: the terrorists pulling off another raid of the Muktsar kind, a few deaths in rioting in Delhi or elsewhere, an attack on a VIP. A year after the accord signed in Delhi, Punjab is yet again poised on the edge of the precipice. Worse, it threatens to draw the whole nation into the bloody slush of communal hatred and terror.

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